Game Emulation In Linux

[Rob Williams]

A common complaint about Linux is that there is a general lack of games. When emulation is brought into the picture though, it opens up a huge world of gaming possibilities. In this article, we will be looking into what emulation is, installing a gamepad and taking a look at a selection of emulators for different consoles.

You can read the full article here and discuss it here.

I had decent success playing super mario 64 under mupen64 in linux, and that is with an intel integrate graphics chip but there were some video glitches.

Under windows I would recommend the Project 64 Emulator, as it simply kicks ass. It works perfectly with every game I have tried and is still in development. Unfortunately it is windows only which sucks....

[linnerd40]

Wow! I love Techage!
Yet another awesome article! I am a great fan of emulators, and AdvanceMAME is my favorite. *sigh* nothing beats a good round of Outrun with that blissful music blasting from my speakers.
Be sure to install AdvanceMENU along with AdvanceMAME for the best experience! It makes loading all those ROMs really easy.
I am also continuously surprised by the good performance I get from all these emulators (although I have never fully been able to get ePSXe to run...).
Linux FTW!

[Rob Williams]

Originally Posted by Unregistered

Under windows I would recommend the Project 64 Emulator, as it simply kicks ass. It works perfectly with every game I have tried and is still in development. Unfortunately it is windows only which sucks....

That's what I have been hearing as well. I have never given it a try myself, but I would like to. mupen64 gave me high-hopes because it was well put together and the plug-ins were plenty. I was somewhat surprised that I found it impossible to play a game.

Originally Posted by linnerd40

Wow! I love Techage!

That's what we are striving for ;-)

Originally Posted by linnerd40

Be sure to install AdvanceMENU along with AdvanceMAME for the best experience! It makes loading all those ROMs really easy. I am also continuously surprised by the good performance I get from all these emulators (although I have never fully been able to get ePSXe to run...). Linux FTW!

I purposely avoided mentioning that actually, just because I wasn't too impressed. At first, it would not detect my games, for whatever reason, therefore I considered it useless. Now when I start it, it does list the games. So I am unsure what the problem was before.

To me, it's just as easy to load up a command line and type in advmame romname... AdvanceMenu turned me off when I heard Duke Nukem when starting up and shutting down... every single time ;-)

Originally Posted by Rob Williams

A common complaint about Linux is that there is a general lack of games. When emulation is brought into the picture though, it opens up a huge world of gaming possibilities. In this article, we will be looking into what emulation is, installing a gamepad and taking a look at a selection of emulators for different consoles.

You can read the full article here and discuss it here.

You must include mednafen.

"Mednafen is a portable, utilizing OpenGL and SDL, argument(command-line)-driven multi-system emulator with many advanced features. The Atari Lynx, GameBoy (Color), GameBoy Advance, NES, PC Engine(TurboGrafx 16), SuperGrafx, Neo Geo Pocket (Color), PC-FX, and WonderSwan (Color) are emulated."
http://mednafen.sourceforge.net/

I should mention it's got a great cheat finder (sort of like zsnes, but menu/keyboard based) Rewind, soft patch support (put the game.rom with game.ips like zsnes) and other goodies. Press F1 to see the hotkeys, you can also set keyboard and/or gamepad settings for player controls.

Anyway don't let the commandline scare ya, you don't need to use it. Basically just mednafen nameofrom, so an open with from nautilus is what I usually use then just double click.
Settings easy to tweak in ~/.mednafen/mednafen.cfg

GPL of course, and the NES core is based on FCEUltra, so you won't be missing anything

-Safaribans

P.S. I have some screencaps of emulators and interpreters (like scummvm) and some other games on my page.

Take a peek if you like
http://www.safaribans.com/screenshots/slide_10.html

[linnerd40]

I purposely avoided mentioning that actually, just because I wasn't too impressed. At first, it would not detect my games, for whatever reason, therefore I considered it useless. Now when I start it, it does list the games. So I am unsure what the problem was before.

Interesting. I have never had any problems with it detecting my ROMs. It really is just as easy to load from the command line, but sometimes I feel like browsing so I just use AdvanceMENU.

[linnerd40]

Alright, this is rather odd.
Yesterday, in light of reading this article, I decided to install the newest version of AdvanceMAME (went from v0.104.0 to v0.106.0... yeah, it was time to update ). Compiling went great... but now when I try to load up a ROM, any ROM, I get the following error:

Unable to initialize the video driver. The errors are:
fb: Unsupported in X.
sdl: Unable to intialize the SDL library, No available video device.

Never had this happen before when I was using the older version. Any ideas? Thanks.

[Rob Williams]

Originally Posted by Unregistered

"Mednafen is a portable, utilizing OpenGL and SDL, argument(command-line)-driven multi-system emulator with many advanced features. The Atari Lynx, GameBoy (Color), GameBoy Advance, NES, PC Engine(TurboGrafx 16), SuperGrafx, Neo Geo Pocket (Color), PC-FX, and WonderSwan (Color) are emulated."

Thanks for the info

I left out Mednafen because I didn't focus on portable game systems at all, but I did include it in the final chart. I admit, I did not even hear of it until the last moment (actually when I was working on that chart), so I didn't give it a try. I've appended an addendum at the end of the review to let people know it's a good choice.

Originally Posted by linnerd40

Interesting. I have never had any problems with it detecting my ROMs. It really is just as easy to load from the command line, but sometimes I feel like browsing so I just use AdvanceMENU.

I agree it can be easier, but AdvenceMenu just didn't grab me at all. I found it ugly, the open/ending sounds annoying and the entire program clunky. It could be that I ran into problems that most people wouldn't, I am not sure.

Originally Posted by linnerd40

Unable to initialize the video driver. The errors are:
fb: Unsupported in X.
sdl: Unable to intialize the SDL library, No available video device.

Did you try downgrading again to 0.104 and see if it solved the problem? Maybe there is some bug with that version, because I found a -lot- of ROMs that didn't work (claiming missing files). Maybe it's just a buggy release. It's been out for quite some time though, so I'd assume the developer would have caught it by now and at least ironed it out despite hiatus.

Hope you can get that worked out. I don't want to be the cause of taking someone away from their emulators. That would defeat the purpose ;-)

I just want to point out that the MAME project has a sister project that covers console games in case you missed it: MESS, http://www.mess.org.

[Rob Williams]

I did stumble on that emulator when I was finishing up the article, but wasn't quite sure what it was (I didn't look that deep since I had all the emulators already), but I will take a look at that one. I really had no idea it supported so many consoles. Thanks for pointing it out.

[usacomputertec]

I'm currently looking into emulating all systems using one Linux OS as a backbone. I want to call it Slick. I want it to start up with a menu that asks you if you want to start your Linux distro, Windows, Mac on a virtual PC, or another virtual machine.

[linnerd40]

Hey again.
Yeah, I tried downgrading, but that doesn't work either
I upgraded my nvidia driver a couple of days ago and haven't played any ROMs since then (haven't used AdvanceMAME)... so that may be the problem, that something is missing from my xorg.conf file.
Odd. Well, I'm sure I'll get it worked out somehow.

Its been a while since Advancemame saw an update, SDLmame is a much better alternative and its updated regularly, its currently at .115u2

Its command-line driven but there are front-ends for it.

http://rbelmont.mameworld.info/?page_id=163

Since switching to Linux, I miss my Windows CoCo 2 emulator - is there one for Linux? I tried to run one in DOSBox once but it just locked the entire machine up.

SDLMAME has a frontend in current development called QMC2 (uses QT4.0).
I'm suprised that there was no mention of SCUMMVM!

Also there is a playstation emulator in current development (pSX) for linux and PCSX2 (PS2) wihich run very well.